Oklahoman

Thanks for this. I had this exchange just the other day with someone who had a different reaction to my LFG posts: So, your recognition was well timed. 🙂 I appreciate you and everyone who takes a second in game to say "thanks for hosting." It helps to drown out people like the person above and keeps me wanting to log back in.

I just think if you are going to play at the highest levels of the game, you should understand how to do some of the most basic things in the game. I did wonder, though, about a token like this being granted for every character you take from 0-50 with no P2W XP boosters and no AE activity. Or, as has been mentioned, maybe a cost in Transcendent's. I don't know, though, feels like a non-starter.

I had planned to do this as a separate post, but it fits in nicely here, so... I feel your pain, @Nightwatch So, I’m recruiting for an MSR the other night, and I have this exchange via tell with someone, who shall remain anonymous: OK, so I was a bit of a jerk in my reply, but I’m also going to defend that here in a bit. Normally, I don’t reply to tells at all when recruiting for an MSR, but I had this short lived fantasy that maybe I was helping people understand the game better to respond with “broadcast in zone when you get here.” I get A LOT of tells for this event, despite specifically asking for NO TELLS. The overall problem here is that in-game I can’t give you a detailed enough reason why I am not inviting you until you broadcast in zone. Now, you could just say, “I don’t need a reason, that’s a reasonable enough request so I will accommodate it.” That’d be cool. But maybe you are a bit like the person above and feel entitled to a more detailed explanation while I am trying to form my league. So, here goes... BROADCASTING CONFIRMS YOU ARE IN THE ZONE You have to be in the zone to broadcast in that zone. You can’t broadcast to RWZ from, say, Atlas Park. So, broadcasting in a zone confirms you are currently in that zone. Rikti Warzone is limited to 50 players right now. At one point it was, for the most part, completely open and running 2 full MSRs at the same time in the same zone happened a lot. Now, a full league of 48 doesn’t leave a lot of extra space in the zone. While we can ask people who are not in the MSR to change zones, nothing requires them to do so - they could be AFK, obstinate, or just not looking at chat. Whatever the case, it is possible for the zone to be full before the league is full. When you broadcast for an invite, I know you are in the zone right now, ready to go. If I give a spot to a player who sent a tell and is out of zone, they may never be able to get into the zone - thus depriving someone who IS in the zone of getting to participate. It is easy to THINK you are in Rikti Warzone 1, when you are in fact in Rikti Warzone 2. Broadcasting helps confirm you are in the same place as the league. BROADCASTING ALLOWS OTHER TEAM LEADERS TO INVITE YOU Putting together a league of 48 people can keep you pretty busy. You are probably advertising every minute or so, inviting people in, placing them in different teams, making sure you have a couple of level 50s on each team, trying to keep a mix of classes on each time, joining in the pre-game banter, etc. When you broadcast in zone, team leaders can help by inviting you to their team. There is a bug that has to do with alignment, and is not likely to get fixed anytime soon. If the league leader has someone on their team out of zone, the league leader may not be able to invite you. That’s another instance where it becomes important for a team leader to be able to help out. You may be on the league leaders gignore list. And, maybe in this case you shouldn’t be in the league anyway. But, if you broadcast and get an invite from a team leader who is NOT ignoring you, you get to participate in the raid so long as you can manage to be cool. Might even be able to get yourself off the league leaders gignore list, if that matters to you. There is a BlockingAccept bug where sometimes, even when everything else looks normal, you invite someone and get an error message like: “Could not Invite (player), BlockingAccept” and they have to be invited again. Here again, having the ability for Team Leaders to redundantly invite folks from broadcast is helpful. Much like the BlockingAccept bug, which you have to look for on your system tab, a league leader is also having to deal with players who are still on a team, or still in an AE session. BROADCASTING KEEPS THE TELL CHANNEL OPEN FOR THE LEAGUE LEADER Another fun little bug in the game is that newly invited players may not get sidekicked up to level 49. Leaving the tell channel open allows the league leader to get important notifications like “I’m not showing on a team” or “I’m still showing as level 1” or “can I be on the same team as X” or any number of other matters that often come up pre-raid. FOLLOWING INVITE DIRECTIONS PROVES YOU READ An MSR doesn’t require a whole lot of direction, but there are some differences in how each league leader runs it so it’s helpful to know you do, in fact, read instructions. Especially when you get into iTrial badge runs, reading chat is very important. If you aren’t following instructions in the LFG ad, how do we know you will follow instructions in the trial itself? AND LASTLY, WHY THE HECK NOT? If you don’t know how to get to the RWZ, most leaders will put directions in their actual LFG ad. You can also use the HELP channel. Also, I’m sure a league leader would forgive a direct tell if you were just asking how to get to the RWZ, so long as you are not asking for an advance invitation. It’s not unreasonable for a team or league leader, regardless of event, to ask for tells - or ask for no tells at all - to get invited. It’s not unreasonable for a team or league leader, regardless of event, to ask you to broadcast for an invite. It’s not like I am saying solve this math problem and show your answer in the request channel. Though, that does give me an idea… Look, there’s a reason why there are not a ton of people running leagues, much less 48 person leagues. You get a lot of hate, and it’s a fair bit of work. There are times I am recruiting for an hour, and other times it fills up on the first ad. You have to deal with interpersonal stuff sometimes, people who go AFK in the bowl, etc. Anything you can do to make my job easier makes me want to run these things more, so I appreciate that.

It occurred to me, too, that perhaps this is easier done through a web page. I understand the LFG code is a bit scary to touch. If you could go to the Server Status page and click on the number in the "Map Instances" column to get some kind of readable breakout there, that would work, too.

I agree with this. I get the idea behind a token and can see the advantages there to cutting junk out of LFG, but getting into an AE farm (at least on Excelsior) is incredibly easy, it seems. What I am concerned with is the number of folks who will show up for an iTrial saying "I have 63 other level 50s, so just let me know what class you need" and then those same people do not know how to pass the league star back to the leader, or to pass a Pacification Grenade to the leader. Maybe the act of leveling from 49->50 should come with a required ingame test of some kind. 🙂

As far as I can tell, the "Avg Wait" column is meaningless. Personally, I would love to see this replaced with "# Running" - if that's at all possible. Basically just a count of how many instances we have running out there already of any particular trial. As a frequent league leader, if I could see there are already 2 BAFs running out there but no LAMs, for instance, that would help me determine what I could run that people may be interested in.

As part of Lambda badge runs, I always have the league pass me their temp power (Pacification Grenade or Molecular Acid). In between runs, it is helpful to delete all those before the next run. Right now, I go into Powers, then right click the temp power, choose delete, then confirm for each of the 10 temp powers I was passed. Is there an easier way to do this? I don't see a slash command for this sort of thing.

FYI: A costume contest moved their time to accommodate the daily MSR, which ended up not happening today, the end result being the costume contest is now scheduled to start at the same time as this event. Anyway, we're gonna roll with it. Do the costume contest if you like, then come join us for the MSR.

This calendar link should adjust to your time zone, but just to put it here - the planned start time is 5pm Central TOMORROW. This will be an open zoned version in RWZ1. I generally accept any levels for events like these, though I will need at least 5 additional level 50s to help lead. For those who cannot attend, I will stream the event live on Twitch at OklahomanCOH: (I didn't know it did that if you post a Twitch link. Interesting.)

I used to work for a software company based in France, and a lot of the employees there go "on holiday" for extended periods of time this time of year. So, to add to your question, it's possible they are short staffed right now.

Also, a big THANK YOU to all the VOLUNTEERS who are working to get us all back into the game right now. I appreciate your time and efforts.

✅Earthquakes ✅Hurricane (well, a tropical storm at that point) ✅Blizzard Can I interest you in a tigernado, too?

Looks like OVH opposed my plans for an all MM MSR. Considering Saturday at 5pm Central as a replacement time - keep an eye on the Excelsior forum or Discord channel for confirmation.

I'm throwing caution and reason to the wind and will try to start a MM only MSR at 10pm Central tonight. We'll see what happens.

It's late. Though, I do regularly fill MSRs at 10pm and even 11pm Central. It's always much tougher to recruit for an all MM MSR, though. I personally won't even be home until about 6pm Central on Monday, so by the time I have dinner with the fam and such we're pretty close to a Hami start time. If I move it off Mastermind Monday, I can do it on a weekend between the daily MSRs, which run from 2-4pm Central, and Hami. I'm open to that, too.

I've been getting requests for another Mastermind ONLY MSR and BAF. If we have enough interest I can do the MSR on Monday night at 10pm Central with the BAF either before (conflicting with Hami) or after (possibly too late for anyone to care).

This has been my experience with @GM Impervium as well. Thanks for all you do!

Acknowledging that ITFs and MSRs are different, I'll run with this to help illustrate. At a time when the server has, say, 700 people on it, you would need/want about 2% of the population for your ITF, and I would need/want about 7% for my MSR. Apparently, the latter is an enormous number that prevents much else from being able to run, and causes us as a community major gas. It would be expected that as a courtesy you would check the player-led event calendar, though an argument could be made that an MSR is not an "event," which may be why this particular league leader didn't think to check. More than that, as a leader you should also double check the Discord channel #excelsior-events-contests. This is the one and only reason I personally use Discord. I was once called out because my MSR ended 6 minutes after the start time of an advertised MSR, resulting in the advertised MSR not being able to run at all, for some reason. I would recommend that if you are not sure that your event will be completely finished at least 30 minutes before an advertised event, don't start it. Give a wide berth. For an advertised event, it would be whoever posted the ad. Unless it's not, and the regular leader has designated someone else to run it for them. Unless it's not, in which case it is probably someone else who regularly participates in that particular event and is stepping up. Unless it's not, in which case you might be able to step in. Clear as mud? They are not. They are not. They are regular people like you and I, with flaws and strengths, and a love for this game and being recognized as a leader. As a league leader you sometimes have to exclude people because they're a problem for the rest of the league, and it sucks. You have to be able to enjoy playing the game yourself, too, or you'll never want to lead one of these again. I have no clue what actually was said, but I can sympathize with a league leader choosing not to include some people who are being rude or otherwise not making the event fun. Now, if they just somehow blanket did not accept everyone signed up for the offending MSR, even if they never said anything, I have a problem with that - though I'm not sure how they would know that. My gut tells me that only the rude people from the offending MSR were excluded, and probably just for that one run. But I don't know. Not my circus, not my Rikti monkeys.

I love Empathy - my first 50 back on live was an Empath defender. And it amazes me how frequently it gets discussed here that Empathy needs revamping. I remember calls for that back during live, too. My concern is that the game has changed a lot from live, at least in my experience. Back on live, we would see a mob ahead, take time to strategize and buff, then implement the plan. Now things are faster, there's usually not a team huddle before a fight, and everyone is kind of doing their own thing. Probably my top thing for Empathy is that Resurrect ought to be Targeted AoE. I'd also be in favor of removing Absorb Pain, moving Resurrect and Clear Mind down so you get them earlier, and placing a new healing pet between Clear Mind and Fortitude (as was suggested in another thread).

I understand. Sometimes it can feel like asking what time it is, and people are telling you how the clock works. Like I say, I just started streaming and you can see what I did here. This is a scene in OBS studio. The very bottom layer is actually a slide I created in Google Drive (Slides). I put the game on top of that, then my video and the HC image on top of that. It sounds like a similar setup to what you are wanting, and it didn't require any artwork to be created. I *think* there is a way to export a scene from OBS studio, so I could create something like this for you and send it to you. But I bet you'd still have to make adjustments to work with your camera, etc. Maybe start with a Google Slide first to sort of layout what you want, and then build on top of that?

Not disregarding the possibility this post might be more successful in another forum, I was curious what exactly you were needing? Over the long weekend I began tinkering with streaming, having never done it before. I've been using OBS studio for a while anyway to create various videos, and found a lot of instructional videos on Youtube on how to create various overlays. If you aren't already committed to another software for that, maybe check that out. I figured out yesterday how to dock all the twitch stuff inside OBS, making it even easier to use for that. The other thing I will say is that after searching around twitch a lot this weekend I found that a lot of streamers, and most COH streamers, use a pretty simple layout of having the game running full screen with a small cutout for their camera view. Maybe you've got something more complicated in mind, but I guess I'm saying it doesn't take much to get started.